2022 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has announced its 2022 inductees! They include Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Pat Benatar, and Harry Belafonte.

Gollum's Cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U"

This deepfake of Gollum covering the song "Nothing Compares 2 U" is wrong on many, many levels. It's also glorious.

Witness the power of deepfakes! If I ever again speak at a workshop about deepfakes, I am whipping out this video.

(This cover needs to be used as a Ride chaser.)

(Tip of the cap to Jennifer Ouellette.)

When a Math Problem Comes Along, You Must Whip it!

When I return to teaching offline, clearly I should go full Devo. pic.twitter.com/udqmPGZ9Kw

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) August 5, 2020

A Song for Today's Era of Social Distancing

First: How did I not think of Don't Stand So Close To Me (by The Police) as a snarky thing to pass along in today's efforts at social distancing?

Second: I am proud that one of my PhD students brought up this song in his e-mail just now. Between that and the fact that another of my PhD students has The Princess Bride as one of her favorite movies.

(In case you needed even more evidence that I have awesome students...)

An Otter's "Careless Whisper"

For the love of god UNMUTE THIS pic.twitter.com/MA48mit8MX

— Nerd Girl Says (@Rachael_Conrad) February 23, 2020

(Tip of the cap to Card Colm Mulcahy.)

LaTeX Without Hats

Technically, with hats.

This is what we're supposed to do with this LaTeX package, right?

cc: @MenWithoutHats1 https://t.co/zBVHpjZ9qB pic.twitter.com/e3WGYXF9Cg

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) November 19, 2019

Note: I think that the official lyrics have "We can..." in the first line that I show, but when Men Without Hats sing it, it does sound somewhat like they include an extra de facto syllable.

Update (11/19/19): I did a copy-and-paste and clearly should have looked a bit more for a better website. I didn't even notice the "They're are" until I saw Ernie Barreto's comment on Facebook. Here is a better site.

"Callin' Oates"

You can call the phone number in this picture to get your Hall & Oates fix (in an emergency, of course). Oh, wow!

P.S. I called the number. This is wrong on many levels, but fantastic on many others!

(Tip of the cap to Angela Wilkerson Fitch.)

Jenny's Constant

How did I not know this? There is a Jenny's constant (for real!)!

As quoted in the above entry in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences:

First few digits reproduce the digits of the phone number in the song "867-5309/Jenny" performed by Tommy Tutone.

The next digit is a 0, and the following 4 digits (1, 9, 8, 1) are the year the song was recorded (1981). (Noticed by Rob Johnson of the explainxkcd.com forums)

(Tip of the cap to Nalini Joshi. Nalini's tweet included a link to this old xkcd (which I had forgotten about, and I don't think I had ever followed the rabbit hole about Jenny's constant.)

An XKCD Comic about Adjustments for High Altitude

On the heels of my return from the 2019 Snowbird conference late last night (and the fact that, at least for one year, we're finally changing the venue), I am highly amused by the xkcd comic about high altitude.

I especially like the Nena one ("Nuclear war can be triggered with only 94 red balloons") and the Scrabble one ("Scrabble letters are worth 16% more").

A Touching Song about a Matrix Entry that is not Well-Defined

This is a touching song about a matrix entry that is very sad because it is not well-defined.

"Party-Time Symmetry"

Note: "PT Symmetry" stands for "Parity–Time Symmetry", not "Party-Time Symmetry", unless you're tired, in which case the latter may be the way that you read the abstracts of certain papers.

I'm pretty sure that Big Audio Dynamite was referring to PT Symmetry in one of their songs. :)

The Physics of a "Proclaimer" Walking 500 Miles, and then Attempting to Walk 500 More

I suppose this was inevitable, but there is now a paper on the physics of a "Proclaimer" walking 500 miles and then attempting to walk 500 more.

The physics of a standard "Proclaimer" walking 500 miles, and then attempting to walk 500 more.https://t.co/9HVckICEKi pic.twitter.com/9AzNP0T9EY

— Robert McNees (@mcnees) December 15, 2017

Quoting from the abstract: In this paper we examine the feasibility for a Proclaimer, modelled on the average Scottish male human, to walk such distances without food. It was found that a Proclaimer, would lose 1.3% of its body mass after 500 miles and 2.8% after 500 more.

That seems like a rather significant underestimate of how much body mass the Proclaimer would lose.

(Tip of the cap to Sabine Hossenfelder.)

2018 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees

The 2018 inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame are Bon Jovi, The Cars (yay!), Dire Straits (yay!), The Moody Blues, and Nina Simone. Additionally, Sister Rosetta Tharpe received an award for early influence.

For the second year in a row, Depeche Mode was nominated but didn't get in. Maybe they'll make it next year?

The Largest Prime Number in a Song

The largest prime number in a popular song is 8675309.https://t.co/A4aXni8NZU

— Algebra Fact (@AlgebraFact) November 29, 2017

(Tip of the cap to MathFeed.)

Early Warning Signs for this Year's Epidemic

And so it begins... pic.twitter.com/9nwjb2mSes

— I❤80s (@IL0VEthe80s) October 26, 2017

"Lock the Taskbar"

Does he think it's not kosher?

The Shareef don't like it pic.twitter.com/pqWN0sDbQ3

— Joao Morais (@_JoaoMorais) September 10, 2017

(Tip of the cap to Dave Richeson.)

The Proper Way to Record 'A-Ha' Moments

We've spent a lot of time this week talking about A-Ha moments for students, and now I know the app that I'm going to use to record them!

(I don't normally care about gratuitous apps, but I am seriously geeking out over this one! I want to try this out.)

P.S. The video for "Take on Me" is the best music video of all time! And this is one of the best songs all time — definitely in my top 5.

Not "Atomic Blondie"

I saw a billboard for the movie Atomic Blonde from my apartment building, and I was really excited that there was going to be a biopic about the band Blondie. So I looked up the IMDB entry, and the movie is in fact rather different.

This, by the way, was a very natural mistake to make. I hope that the song "Atomic" is in the film, at least.

Fake Gnus

I am spreading fake gnus.

(This had to be done.)

I also created this selection of fake gnus, though of course with images drawn from various sources online.

Published Version of "88 Lines About 44 Mathematicians"

In 2009, I wrote a parody of the song 88 Lines About 44 Women that was much more mathematically oriented. A version of this song has now been published in Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. The version that I submitted to the journal is slightly censored. I think I only changed one word, which one will often see when comparing the album version of a song to versions that receive radio airplay.

Here are some article details.

Title: 88 Lines About 44 Mathematicians

Author: Mason A. Porter

Abstract: Well, there isn't really an abstract per se.



Note: In 2014, somebody else recorded a song by the same name on YouTube, although the lyrics are entirely different. Also, that guy focused much more on mainstream mathematicians than I did.